Kong 1.0 launches: the only open source API platform specifically built for microservices, cloud, and serverless

The API is the building block of much modern software. With Kong 1.0, launching today at Kong Summit, Kong believes it has cemented its position as the go-to platform for developing APIs on modern infrastructures, like cloud-native, microservices, and serverless.

The release of the first stable version of Kong marks an important milestone for the company as it looks to develop what it calls a ‘service control platform.’ This is essentially a tool that will allow developers, DevOps engineers, and architects to manage their infrastructure at every point – however they choose to build it. It should, in theory off a fully integrated solution that let’s you handle APIs, manage security permissions, and even leverage the latest in cutting edge artificial intelligence for analytics and automation.

CEO Augusto Marietti said that “API management is rapidly evolving with the industry, and technology must evolve with it. We built Kong from the ground up to meet these needs — Kong is the only API platform designed to manage and broker the demands that in-flight data increasingly place on modern software architectures.”

How widely used is Kong?

According to the press release, Kong has been downloaded 45 million times, making it the most widely used open source API platform. The team stress that reaching Kong 1.0 has taken three years of intensive development work, done alongside customers from a wide range of organizations, including Yahoo! Japan and Healthcare.gov.

“as Yahoo! Japan shifts to microservices, we needed more than just an API gateway – we needed a high-performance platform to manage all APIs across a modern architecture… With Kong as a single point for proxying and routing traffic across all of our API endpoints, we eliminated redundant code writing for authentication and authorization, saving hundreds of hours. Kong positions us well to take advantage of future innovations, and we’re excited to expand our use of Kong for service mesh deployments next.”

New features in Kong 1.0

Kong 1.0, according to the release materials “combines sub-millisecond low latency, linear scalability and unparalleled flexibility.” Put simply, it’s fast but also easy to adapt and manipulate according to your needs. Everything a DevOps engineer or solutions architect would want.

Although it isn’t mentioned specifically, Kong is a tool that exemplifies the work of SREs – site reliability engineers. It’s a tool that’s designed to manage the relationship between various services, and to ensure they not only interact with each other in the way they should, but that they do so with minimum downtime.

The Kong team appear to have a huge amount of confidence in the launch of the platform – the extent to which they can grow their customer base depends a lot on how the marketplace evolves, and how much the demand for forward-thinking software architecture grows over the next couple of years.